Eggs require as much energy to produce as beef. Can we make them from plants?

Summary:Factory-farmed eggs require more energy to produce than milk and swine, combined. That's just one of the economic arguments inspiring Hampton Creek's quest to create a plant-based egg alternative.

The first thing to greet you when you enter Hampton Creek
Foods' headquarters in San Francisco's SOMA neighborhood is Jake, the founder's Golden
Retriever. When you pull yourself away from his persistent pleas for love, you'll look up and wonder if you've strolled into a coffee
shop. Around a large table and along a high counter, a hive of hip, casually
dressed 30-somethings have their heads buried in their laptops, typing
furiously or reading with furrowed brows. But this venture-backed group of biochemists,
marketers and chefs are not making another insufferablemobile app. They are developing a
new kind of egg — one made with plants, not laid by chickens.

At the helm is Josh Tetrick, the dashing 34-year-old former
collegiate footballer who founded Hampton Creek in 2011. You detect the trace of a drawl as Tetrick, raised in Alabama, rattles off well-worn pitch
points for the merits of replacing the 1.2 trillion eggs laid by chickens each
year with plant-based alternatives. And compelling pitches they are: Barely out
of the gate, Hampton Creek attracted $500,000 in seed funding from Khosla
Ventures. Bill Gates, Peter Thiel and most recently the powerful Chinese billionaire
Li Ka-shing — who invested $23 million — are also backers.

Even if you aren't bothered by the fact that factory-farmed
eggs are laid by hens that are de-beaked, cruelly jammed nine to a cage and
force-fed soy and corn their whole lives, the conventional egg has an
environmental backstory that is perhaps equally horrifying. The ratio of energy
input to protein output for beef cattle is 40:1. You might guess that eggs
would be much lower, but you'd be wrong. According to a report in the American
Journal of Clinical Nutrition, the ratio for eggs is 39:1. That is more energy
than is used to produce milk and raise swine combined.

Egg production is a resource hog largely because of the
land and petroleum-based fertilizers and water needed to grow chicken feed.
The whole premise of raising chickens for eggs does not make much sense from a
basic business efficiency point of view, Tetrick says. In fact, 70 percent of the cost of egg
production is from chicken feed, he notes, which is how Hampton
Creek can compete on price.

Ah, but herein lies the rub: finding one plant from which to
tease out the many characteristics — such as the ability to emulsify, gel or foam — found in the humble egg has proven impossible thus far.

The proteins of the Canada
Yellow Pea #9 were an early score for the company; they are the basis for Just
Mayo, a vegan mayonnaise and Hampton Creek's flagship product. But before the
winning derivative of Canada Yellow Pea #9 was discovered to be a great egg
alternative for making mayo, the company tried more than 1,400 different formulations
that failed.

The grocer Whole Foods has carried Just Mayo since
last year, but Hampton Creek scored a bigger coup this year: Safeway is rolling
the product out nationwide. Even Costco is starting to sell Just Mayo (in XL
containers, of course).

Hampton Creek's imitation scrambled egg"If I only sell products to vegans, I will have
failed," Tetrick says, while disclosing that he is a vegan himself. In the short term,
disrupting factory farm egg production in the United States might mean displacing a
chunk of the roughly 26 billion eggs consumed as ingredients. Mayo is a
big part of that. So are baked goods, which is why Hampton Creek's next
product is Eat the Dough, a cookie dough that consumers can eat raw, without
the fear of illness related to consuming raw egg. Just Scramble, a scrambled egg alternative (pictured right), is Hampton Creek's Holy Grail. It is also not ready for prime time, based on my taste test. Tetrick readily acknowledges that mimicking the taste of egg convincingly is a hurdle his company has yet to clear.

Over the long term, Hampton Creek has its sights on mainland
China, where a whopping 38 percent of the global egg supply is produced (the
United States accounts for only 8 percent). That's why the recent investment by Hong
Kong magnate Li Ka-shing is an important strategic
win for the company.

Before Hampton Creek cracks the global egg, however, there
is plenty of work to do. A single crop species might have thousands of
cultivars with slightly different characteristics. Finding the perfect
combination for a given application is slow and methodical work.

That is why, behind the coffee shop-like facade of the Hampton Creek headquarters, where its real laboratory core reveals itself, I find senior
food scientist Gosia Jakubasch checking on a tray of pretty green seedlings which
she will later analyze, looking for clues that they might create a plant-based egg that might emulsify like a champ.
Or may be great at coagulating. Who knows. "It's all in the
genes," she says.

Mary Catherine O'Connor has written for Outside, Fast Company, Wired.com, Smithsonian.com, Entrepreneur, Earth2Tech.com, Earth Island Journal and The Magazine. She is based in San Francisco.
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